Saturday, October 18, 2014

Following up on yesterday’s post about humility, I draw your
attention to Melissa Dahl’s New York Magazine post about bragging.

It turns out that people who brag, who indulge in what Dahl
calls “shameless self-promotion” are so full of themselves that they do not see
how boring and off-putting they really are.

A culture of narcissism is a culture of shamelessness. In
order to indulge it for any sustained period of time you are obliged to turn
off your sensitivity to the feelings of other people.

Think about it: shameless self-promotion can only continue
if you numb yourself to the signs—trust me, there are many—that you are
alienating your interlocutor.

In Dahl’s words:

In a
not-yet-published paper, researchers led by Irene Scopelliti at City University
London argue that people who brag about themselves both underestimate how much
it bugs people, while overestimating how interested people are in the stories
they’re telling.

One must suppose that these braggarts were taught, by
someone at some time, that it was good to toot their own horn, to drone on about
their greatness, to name drop and to sprinkle their conversation with
references to signs of their success.

Undoubtedly, the therapy culture and the self-help industry
told people that if they talk about themselves more often, other people would
naturally be more interested in them. If it did, it did them a disservice:

One
study done in the 1980s, for example, found that when people tried to make
their conversational partner more interested in them, the opposite happened.
Their partners liked them less, and they also rated the self-promoters as less
competent than people who’d been paired with a partner who didn’t try so hard
to win their approval.

In the old days it was considered bad form to talk about
yourself. It was even worse form to brag about your accomplishments.

If you want other people to be interested in you, start out
by showing an interest in them. Nothing is more appealing in an interlocutor than
rapt attention, serious interest in what the other person is saying.

Especially, when the other person is not talking about
himself but is expounding on a topic that is of mutual interest.

As I explained in The
Last Psychoanalyst, people connect when they find common ground. That might
mean talking about time at the same college, but it might also mean talking about the
weather or the ball game.